![]() Map of all the time zones in the world (image credit: )įirst, there are the obvious 24 basic 15-degree slices (UTC, UTC +1 to +12, and UTC -1 to -11). You can play around with the full interactive version on too. So anyway, let’s explain how to see all the time zones in the world on the color-coded map. And as with everything else, they make it worse, unsurprisingly. Governments love to get involved in every part of our lives, even our sleep schedule. It’s a special offset time zone and a bonus time zone around the International Date Line.īy the way, daylight saving time is obviously very absurd. Yes, 38 is the number of time zones in the world, even though that adds up to 39.īecause of the weird UTC +13:45, which is only for New Zealand’s Chatham Islands (population: 800) and only during daylight saving time, which is counted in both the 2nd and 3rd types. 4 bonus time zones (around the International Date Line).11 special offset time zones (not in even 1-hour increments).There are 3 “types” of time zones, if we can call them that: What explains the number of time zones in the world So let’s look at those slight complications. Those modifications have created quite a few quirks on the time zone map, which I’ll cover in a separate post soon (like the neighboring islands with a 26-hour time difference and how to jump forward 3.5 hours in 1 step, in theory).īut that just explains the weird time zone borders, not the reason there are 38 time zones instead of 24. Other countries are huge and should have multiple time zones, but their government wants everyone to have the same time (like in China, for example). ![]() Imagine if major cities had a time zone line right in the middle! That would make no sense. See full-size infographicįirst, time zones don’t just follow the longitudinal lines: they were adapted to follow regional and national borders for convenience. This color-coded map shows them well, but we’ll get back to it in a second. There are in fact 38 time zones in the world, over 50% more than it could be if things were kept simple. Each time zone would measure 15 degrees (360 degrees divided by 24 hours) and would represent a 1-hour difference in solar time.īut it’s not that simple. So, in theory, that would make a nice even 24 time zones if each time zone were just 1 hour apart and were set according to distances only. ![]() That rotation process takes 24 hours, so that’s the length of a day. It rotates on its axis, so that gives us night and day periods. ![]() Additionally, Antarctica has about 10 unofficial time zones.The Earth is a sphere, so that’s 360 degrees in longitude. One such example is India, the thought it is an extensive territory, it observes only a single time zone like China does. Majority of the countries, in particular, the smaller ones, comprise of only one time zone but there are about 23 countries that have at least two time zones and France has the maximum of all i.e. They deeply studied the movement of the Earth and finally came up with around 24 time zones that have been theoretically drawn onto the world map. The scientists introduced the time zones with a difference of 15 degrees that denoted the variance of about one hour in the average solar time. The actual borders that have been drawn on the time zone map hardly show coordination with 15-degree borders and adhere to the external and internal borders. Additionally, the IDL or International Date Line leads to the creation of three more. In the late 19th century a method to subdivide the world into several time zones was introduced by a group of scientists. The logical answer to this question is that there are about 24 time zones as there exist 24 hours and also the time earth takes to complete one rotation is 24 hrs. This would, however, be true only if the time zones were an hour apart but this is not the case, as there are several time zones that are on 30-45 minutes offset and thus increasing the total number of time zones. ![]()
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